SECULARISM AND PARTY POLITICS


February 15th 1999


The next issue, Number 33, will appear on March 15th 1999.





There is recurrent controversy in the secularist press on this subject. There is no controversy in principle about the need for secularist input to political life generally. Obviously, politics is concerned with what our rulers do to, and for, people - individually, sectionally and as the community generally. One of the many ways of promoting secularist aims is, clearly, to press for the appropriate policy and legislative changes and this entails the exerting of political pressure upon the government and the legislature.

The controversy arises in so far as people of right-wing persuasion claim that the left are always trying to take over the secularist organisations and associated periodical publications. The counter claim - that the right are the predators taking over secularism - is scarcely ever heard.

The main thrusts of this article are that the terms 'right' and 'left' need to be defined properly and that if we do that then we might see what substance there is in the right's complaints against the left. Without such definition ....... the controversy is sterile and tedious.



The only really precise notion of right/left in politics refers to specifically revolutionary situations. 'Left' refers to over-optimistic revolutionaries - those who claim that the time is ripe for the revolution to go farther and faster ...... while 'right' refers to the more pessimistic comrades who assert that caution must be exercised to ensure that the revolution does not go too far too fast. Both views can be genuine but both can be corrupt. The left stance is often adopted by agents provocateurs while the right stance is often taken by people wishing to 'run with the hare and hunt with the hounds'. Outside of revolutionary politics, the right/left distinction is increasingly unhelpful to our political understanding.

Perhaps the best sense we can make of the left/right distinction, in such countries as the contemporary UK, USA and the like, may be roughly as follows. People of the left tend to favour economic discipline based upon an altruistic view of the public good but they value freedom in such matters as the personal life and they advocate legal rights to this, that and the other thing ....... while right-wingers tend to value minimal economic intervention in our lives - on the ground that intelligent egoism (enlightened self-interest) serves human needs best - but they value conformity in the personal life and they place much more emphasis upon duties than upon rights. Both trends are potentially corrupt: the left tends to be the chosen position for 'control freaks' who, not quite incidentally, become wealthy by way of the economic/social control they achieve; the right is the chosen position of 'wealth freaks' who become powerful, not quite incidentally, by way of the riches they accumulate.

The haziness of these attempted distinctions will be apparent to anyone who cares to contemplate the unattractive spectacle of some of our contemporary 'labour millionaires' but to go down that road is to dodge the point of this article. Here, we are concerned with any meaning my attempted distinctions might have for secularists. In particular, would we be correct to expect left, or right, leanings among secularists?

To do this we have to frame a brief working definition of secularism (secular humanism or whatever other term one might prefer). Briefly we might define that position as one of faith that human beings, individually/collectively have what it takes to lead sufficiently flourishing lives without reference to, or perceived dependence upon, anything (a god for example) distinct from the natural universe.

In so far as religion is allied to the established order (which, of course, is by no means always the case) humanists will tend to be rebels against that order and, in some sense, left-wing in their opinions. Right-wingers tend to support things traditional and will often be less inclined to secularism. We do, after all, know the phrase 'The Religious Right' while we never hear the phrase 'The Religious Left'. There is some natural correlation between secular and left-wing and some correlation between religious and right-wing.

Considering that deference to a god is almost always accompanied by deference to self-selecting experts on the will of the alleged god ...... it is evident that theism is effectively a template for human tyranny. Granted that to be the case - and there is much historical support for this critique of theism - many left-wing thinkers and some right-wing thinkers may well lean to secularism in defence of their respective ideals of freedom. People of the left may well see theism as a threat to their personal freedom; people of the right may well see theism as a threat to their economic freedom and the associated freedom from nanny-statism. So we might expect secularists to be found across the party political spectrum but mostly to the left.

When we consider the theory of personal morality, the people of the left are more humanistic; they see morality as a human attribute geared to human needs and having no provenance outside the natural order. People of the right see morality as a matter of prescribed and proscribed acts - duties to be done and lapses from duty to be avoided - and any duty-based morality has to be nearer to god-based authority than to people-centred needs.

In so far as secularists see their humanism as a basis for mature personal ethics ... it is likely that they will lean more to the left than to the right. The right-wing secular humanist is almost certain, therefore, to feel somewhat isolated within the movement - although genuinely part of it.. Those of us who are left of centre in politics would do well to avoid smuggling into humanism naive left-liberal ideas that are no doubt the opinions of many humanists but which cannot, with proper rigour, be called humanist opinion.

We would all do well to contribute, whatever positive perceptions we have, to the common stock of humanist ideas and we need to acknowledge that the rather different notions of freedom, that are held, respectively, by left and right-wing people, are each very important. It would be a great pity if the shallow crudities of the party political dogfight were allowed to divert us from our shared humanist ideals and practices.

We stand not for any wall-to-wall system but for ideological minimalism - a simple lingua franca of ideas that allows the maximum variety with the minimum of friction. There is room for all non-authoritarian sorts of politics within the secular humanist, atheist, agnostic .... or whatever ... circles in which we move. There is no room in our secularist arena for extraneous political quarrelling and no room whatever for the marginalisation of sincere freedom-loving political minorities within it.





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